Top 10 DevSecOps Best Practices for 2025

What Is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps integrates security practices within DevOps processes. It emphasizes collaboration between development, security, and operations to ensure secure applications and infrastructure from the start. DevSecOps aims to shift security left, embedding it early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This approach reduces vulnerabilities and aligns security with agile and continuous development practices.

Integrating security in all phases of the SDLC fosters proactive risk management. Automation of security tasks ensures rapid, reliable security checks. This minimizes disruptions in development and facilitates quick adaptation to new security threats.

Core Principles of DevSecOps

Collaboration Between Development, Security, and Operations Teams

Effective DevSecOps relies on collaboration among development, security, and operations teams. This collaboration ensures security policies align with development goals and operational practices, fostering a unified approach to risk management. Cross-functional teams improve communication, reducing silos that can hamper security implementation.

Cooperation among teams facilitates shared responsibility for security outcomes. Regular meetings and feedback loops help identify potential threats and solutions collaboratively. This holistic approach enhances overall system security and optimizes workflow efficiency.

Integration of Security into the SDLC

Security integration into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) involves embedding security checks and processes throughout the development lifecycle. This approach ensures potential vulnerabilities are identified and resolved early. By making security a shared responsibility, teams collaborate more effectively to create secure products.

This integration shifts traditional security assessments from post-development to every stage of creation. It reduces the number and severity of security issues that manifest later. Continuous security integration within the SDLC ensures agility and compliance across evolving development environments.

Automation of Security Processes

Automation in DevSecOps is key for consistency and efficiency. Automated security processes provide immediate feedback on code security, allowing developers to correct vulnerabilities swiftly. This reduces human error and allows for large-scale testing without manual intervention.

Incorporating tools for static and dynamic analysis streamlines security checks in CI/CD pipelines. Automated processes free teams to focus on critical issues by handling routine checks. This leads to a strong security posture with minimal disruption to development timelines.

Read our guide to DevSecOps pipeline

DevSecOps Best Practices

1. Foster a Security-First Culture

Establishing a security-first culture is critical in DevSecOps. This involves embedding security considerations into all aspects of development and operations. Encouraging teams to prioritize security supports early identification and resolution of threats, reducing long-term risks.

Communication and collaboration are key to fostering this culture. Regular training and awareness programs strengthen security understanding and compliance. Security-first thinking ensures that security becomes a natural part of the development process, minimizing risks without sacrificing agility.

2. Implement Secure Coding Standards

Secure coding standards reduce vulnerabilities by guiding developers in writing safe code. Establishing these standards provides guidelines for minimizing threats during development. Standards should evolve to address new vulnerabilities and adapted technologies.

Enforcing secure coding practices involves regular code reviews, trainings, and documentation updates. Integrating these standards into development workflows promotes consistent coding practices, bolstering software security. Adherence to secure coding standards provides a solid foundation for reducing risks and enhancing software reliability.

3. Conduct Regular Threat Modeling and Risk Assessment

Regular threat modeling and risk assessment identifies potential vulnerabilities and mitigates them before exploitation. By analyzing design and architecture, teams can predict and counteract future threats, minimizing impact. This proactive approach supports informed security planning and prioritization.

Conducting regular assessments involves adopting systematic methodologies for threat identification. Insights gained drive effective countermeasures, enhancing resilience. This continuous evaluation of security posture ensures software remains protected against evolving threats and maintains compliance with industry standards.

4. Automate Security Testing in CI/CD Pipelines

Automating security testing in CI/CD pipelines ensures continuous security checks with each code change. This immediate feedback loop allows teams to address vulnerabilities promptly, maintaining the pace of development without compromising security. Automated tests eliminate human error, enhancing test reliability.

Proper integration of automated tools like static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) enforces security standards consistently throughout development cycles. Continuous automation of security testing reinforces a proactive security posture.

5. Use Real-Time Security Monitoring and Alerting

Implementing real-time security monitoring enables teams to detect and respond to threats as they occur. By using tools that provide continuous insight into application behavior, infrastructure health, and traffic anomalies, teams can identify potential security breaches before they escalate. Real-time monitoring combined with automated alerting ensures rapid response to suspicious activities, helping to contain incidents swiftly and reduce damage.

To maximize the effectiveness of this practice, integrate monitoring tools with centralized logging systems that collect data from across the environment. This allows security teams to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies more effectively. Establish clear protocols for incident response to ensure that alerts are acted upon promptly, minimizing potential downtime and security risks.

6. Adopt a Zero Trust Architecture

Zero trust architecture is an approach that treats every request as a potential threat, whether it originates inside or outside the network. By enforcing the principle of “never trust, always verify,” teams can ensure that every user, device, and application undergoes strict authentication and authorization before gaining access to any resource.

Adopting a zero trust model involves implementing multifactor authentication (MFA), least privilege access, and continuous validation of user behavior. This granular control over access helps prevent lateral movement in case of a breach and strengthens overall security, making it difficult for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities.

7. Integrate Security into IaC (Infrastructure as Code)

As DevSecOps heavily relies on automating infrastructure management through IaC, it’s essential to embed security controls into these configurations. By integrating security policies directly into IaC templates, teams can ensure that infrastructure provisioning adheres to secure standards, preventing misconfigurations that could lead to vulnerabilities.

Advanced DevOps teams take this one step further with a GitOps approach. They leverage Git as the single source of truth for infrastructure definitions. Security policies are codified and version-controlled alongside the code. This enables automated checks and enforcement of security standards every time a change is proposed or deployed, reducing the risk of insecure configurations.

8. Leverage Security Chaos Engineering

Security chaos engineering is a technique that intentionally injects security failures or vulnerabilities into production systems to test the resilience of your security defenses. Similar to chaos engineering for operational reliability, this approach helps teams discover weak points under real-world conditions, ensuring that systems can withstand attacks.

By introducing controlled security disruptions, teams gain valuable insights into how well their detection, response, and recovery processes function under pressure. This proactive method strengthens security defenses by exposing hidden vulnerabilities that might otherwise go unnoticed during normal operations.

9. Conduct Red Team/Blue Team Exercises

Regularly conducting red team/blue team exercises sharpens both defensive and offensive security skills within your organization. Red teams simulate real-world attacks to test the defenses, while blue teams focus on detecting and mitigating these threats. These exercises highlight weaknesses in the security architecture and processes, providing actionable insights to improve security posture.

These simulations also foster collaboration and help teams develop rapid response strategies. By continually challenging defenses in a controlled environment, organizations can stay prepared for real-world threats and refine their security measures based on the lessons learned.

10. Implement Policy as Code 

Policy as Code (PaC) is the practice of codifying security policies and compliance rules into machine-readable formats. By implementing PaC, organizations can automate the enforcement of security and compliance standards within their infrastructure, applications, and workflows. 

This approach allows security policies to be versioned, reviewed, and tested just like application code, ensuring they remain consistent and traceable across environments. It reduces the chance of policy drift and helps prevent unauthorized changes that might introduce vulnerabilities.

CI/CD Security with Codefresh

Codefresh can help with CI/CD security in a number of ways

1. It provides out of the box integrations for several code scanning tools
2. It supports running security analysis tools before, during and after each deployment
3. It will work with any software supply security solution to monitor and assess risks in any part of the software lifecycle
4. It includes a built-in facility for storing secrets but also integrates with popular secret solutions (such as Hashicorp Vault or the secret facilities of major cloud providers)
5. It allows organizations to run pipelines and deploy application with a zero trust model where confidential information never leaves the customer premises

Most importantly because GitOps is the central paradigm behind all aspects of the Codefresh platform, with Codefresh organizations get auditing and tracing facilities out of the box using standard Git tools. Every action in Codefresh (even from the UI) is backed by a Git commit. Simply looking at Git history provides an audit log for everything that happened in the platform.